Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Association of Child Life Professionals and a Personal Update

Have you heard? The Child Life Council or CLC is now officially the Association of Child Life Professionals or the ACLP!

They launched their new website this month! Check it out at www.childlife.org! It features new web design, more organized menu, and lots of news and research! I haven't had time to explore the whole website, but it's worth checking out.

In other news, the Annual ACLP Conference registration opened this last week and the early bird price is good until March! Sydney and I are both planning on going this year and Sydney is actually on the planning committee! We would love to meet as many of you as we can and network with our fellow child lifers! So start saving now and we will see you in May in Las Vegas! Check out this link to read more about the schedule, speakers, and social events!

Attempting to keep you updated in the Child Life world,

-Caroline

P.S. I finally survived and graduated with my Master of Public Administration in December! My graduate thesis is titled:

Not Enough to Go Around: Statistical Analysis of Staffing of Child Life Patterns

I know it's a lot to read, but if you are interested you can find a copy of it here. (Let me know if this link does not work!)

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Abstract: Child life programs are gaining popularity and support in pediatric care as the field grows. However, healthcare is growing rapidly and child life programs are struggling to advocate for their place within pediatric care despite the fact that the American Academy of Pediatrics defines child life as a necessity. This study seeks to answer the question: How does the level of pediatric care offered by a hospital affect the staffing of child life programs? The sample (N=154) hospitalprograms in this study offer varying levels of pediatric care. The independent variable is the level of pediatric care offered by hospitals, the dependent variables includes seven different staffing reports, and the control variables include demographics regarding bed size and percent budgets. Statistical analysis (ANOVA and ANCOVA) determined there is a statistically significant relationship between the level of pediatric care and staffing of child life programs. This relationship is impacted by the number of pediatric beds in a hospital. Future research should explore the relationship between adequate child life staffing and hospital revenue enhancement. This research is needed to show whether or not enhanced hospital revenue is due to an increased census, which could be a result of customer satisfaction from properly staffing child life programs.